[Regarding previews] Do you know where they are located and can this be customized?  I would love to have my library in the external FW drive and have the previews in my local drive, so when I travel, I can always have a small size replica of all my images.  

Previews are stored in the Aperture Library and that cannot be changed. I have some details of exactly how and where in an article on Preview Storage. However, there are a couple of ways of achieving what you want to do.

The first is to copy out the previews from the library each time you want to travel. If you have iView then quit Aperture and drop your Library file onto the iView icon and let it catalog. It will find all your originals and two sizes of preview, one at full size (or whatever you selected in Aperture's prefs), and one at 240x240. Use iView's search features to isolate the previews by finding those created after a certain date, or of a certain type (previews are JPG), or of a certain size, or some other salient features that will work. Once isolated you can use iView's copy tool to duplicate the selection on your laptop. This will also give you an incremental solution because you will be able to see the date you last updated your laptop by examining the file dates and use that to filter the iView results.

The second is to change the way you are working. Put your library on your laptop, complete with previews, and store the originals as referenced images on your Firewire drive. This will mean that you no longer have to make copies and manage the previews so much. If you also have a desktop machine then you can also have a library on that and have it reference the same images on your Firewire drive.

Tags: Aperture, Previews, Library, Q&A